


metamorphosis

by euriele



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Blood, Blood and Gore, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-08
Updated: 2014-06-08
Packaged: 2018-02-03 22:29:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1758571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/euriele/pseuds/euriele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She remembers when they first met. She remembers when they were just Luke, Felix and Vanessa.</p><p>She remembers them, before they changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	metamorphosis

She meets Luke and Felix when she’s seven years old. She’s been made an orphan by the war that rages on around her, and she’s running for cover as yet another battle fires up in the streets. It starts so suddenly that all she does for a second is stand and stare as the Marines flood one end of the street and the Covenants the other before she screams and runs for the alley.

She falls, scrapes her knee and scrambles back to her feet again, kicking up the dust around her. There’s an explosion overhead, metal and rock falling around her as she runs. And dust. There’s so much dust. It gets in her nose and down her throat, makes her choke until there are tears running down her scarred cheeks.

And she’s in the alley, diving behind the bin. She curls in on herself, presses her hands over her ears to try and drown out the sounds of gunfire and explosions. But they’re too loud for her to block out, and what’s worse is that she can hear the screams of dying men, the garbled talk of Covenant aliens drawing closer.

It takes her a second to register that she’s not alone in the alley.

They’re sat across the gap her, curled up beneath the cardboard boxes she took to be their homes. They’re both older than her. The eldest boy looks to be twelve, all dark-skin and scars. The boy next to him is a maybe a year younger, freckled and gangly. The older boy sees her, waves a hand to her. She shakes her head, not wanting to move from her hiding spot. But something explodes overhead, a satellite dish falls into the alley in front of her and she screams, skitters from her hiding spot and right over to the boys.

The older one scoots over immediately, making room for her in the tiny shelter. She squeezes in beside him, curls up by his side and clings to his dusty jacket. His arm worms its way around her shoulder and he holds her close, rubbing her back soothingly. The other boy shifts to sit at her other side, wraps his arms around his knees. And they three of them just sit together, listen to the sounds of gunshots and death until it all goes quiet.

The older boy moves first. He crawls out of the makeshift shelter, coughs as the dust gets into his nose. He struggles to his feet, wary of the rubble still falling around him.

“Wait,” he says to her and the other boy, holding up his hand.

“Luke, it’s not safe,” the other boy says, leaning out of the shelter. “Luke –“

“Just wait,” Luke hisses, reaching the mouth of the alley. He presses himself flat against the dirty walls, peeks around the corner into the dusty street. She hears him growl. “Can’t see anything. Gimme a sec –“

“No, Luke, don’t –“

But Luke just walks out into the street, disappearing into the thick dust. The younger boy curses, slams the cardboard wall with his fist. He gets to his feet too, takes her by the hand and pulls her up with him. She doesn’t resist, because she feels weirdly safe with the two boys. She lets herself get pulled out into the street, closes her eyes and just lets the boy pull her along because she doesn’t want to look at the remains of both humans and aliens, mingled in with the rubble and dust.

“Luke,” the boy calls. “Luke!”

“Felix, shut up!” Luke hisses back from somewhere down the street. “I’m fine.”

Felix sighs with relief. “Where are you?”

“Here.” Luke crawls out from the remains of the shop he was shifting through. “The Marines are gone. The aliens too.”

“So, are we safe?”

“If the aliens won, the alarms would be going off.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Luke looks to her now, his hard gaze softening. He crouches down, tilts his head sideways as he looks at her. It makes her squirm, because she doesn’t like being scrutinized like she is.

“What’s your name?” Luke asks her.

She tries to remember – what is her name? It’s been a while since she’s used it. To the city folk, she’s an urchin, an orphan, something unimportant. They don’t care about her name. They only care if she’s stolen from them. One of them took two of her fingers for “stealing”, though she’d been nowhere near their shop.

She racks her brains, remembers the day they learnt about name meanings in school. She remembers her name’s meaning. ‘Butterfly’. And she remembers her name.

“Vanessa,” she says. “My name is Vanessa.”

 

*

 

They move from alley-to-alley. They stick together, become known amongst the people. They know that Luke and Felix have been joined by another city urchin, a girl with a missing finger. She actually helps a lot with the begging, because people can’t help but feel their heartstrings tugged when they see a little homeless girl with two missing fingers.

It’s actually easier, living with Felix and Luke. It’s a comfort at night, knowing that there are two other people sleeping beside her, one on either side. It lulls her to sleep easier, keeps the nightmares away. She finds she likes Luke better, prefers to curl up beside him. He lies still at night, doesn’t twist and turn like Felix does. So she takes to pressing herself against his back, resting her forehead against the rough fabric of his shirt.

Felix steals. He’s good at stealing. He gets into a shop, works his charm on the shop workers, steals whilst they’re not looking. Vanessa feels bad sometimes, because she knows that food is rationed in light of the war. But when Felix comes back with fresh fruit – the first fresh fruit she’s seen in years – she can’t be mad. She just takes her strawberries and practically inhales them.

They tell her about themselves. Felix was from Earth, until his family moved them to Chorus. Now he’s an orphan like her. Luke’s Chorus-born like Vanessa, and he’s lost his parents too. He’s been moving around a lot longer, living in warzones for years. That’s how he got his scars, and he’s got a lot of scars, starting on his face and crawling down his back. Luke tells Vanessa that he found Felix in some homeless shelter, right before it got destroyed.

She tells them about her parents, how they were Marines and that one day she received two UNSC flags through the mail. Then the house was gone one day, and she ended up on the streets. Felix asks about her fingers a lot. He asks a lot of questions. He’s constantly chattering away, whilst Luke is mostly silent. He plays intimidation a lot, scaring away anyone he doesn’t trust.

She likes Felix and Luke. She likes them a lot. She hoped they didn’t go away.

 

*

 

They find somewhere to stay.

There’s another firefight happening in the streets, but it’s not between the Marines and the Covenants. Instead, it’s between the Marines and the people of Chorus. The people have had enough of the fighting being done on their doorsteps, of the rations, of the bombings and death. They’re fighting against the government now, fighting for a change. But even Vanessa can see that it’s not going well, because the people fall like flies and there’s a lack of organization. Once the Marines and the Federal Army roll up with their tanks and machine guns, they’re running for the hills.

Luke takes Vanessa by the wrist when he sees the fighting going on, pulls her towards an abandoned apartment complex. She takes hold of Felix’s wrist and pulls him along. The three of them duck as rubble and bullets pierce the air above their head. Vanessa slips on something – a puddle of blood – and falls to her hands and knees. Luke stops, turns and lifts her up onto his back before setting off at a run. She presses her face into his back, fists bunching up the shirt at his shoulders.

He takes them inside the building, carries her up the stairs to the second floor. He busts down the door to one of the apartments, puts her down just beyond the doorway. Felix stumbles in behind them, and Locus slams the door shut. He turns, looks around for something to block the door and finds a chair. He pushes it up against the door, pulls Felix and Vanessa away from it.

“I think we’re good here,” Felix gasps out, out of breath from running.

“For now,” Luke says, wiping sweat from his forehead.

Vanessa looks around. It’s a small apartment, with peeling walls, bare floors and grimy windows, two of which are broken. It’s obviously been ransacked, because all the cupboards are wide open and the saggy couch in the living room is flipped over. There’s a blood splatter across the left wall of the living room that makes bile rise up Vanessa’s throat.

Felix and Luke push the couch back upright. Luke drags it across the floor, moves it so that it covers up most of the blood splatter. It doesn’t matter because she’s already seen it, but she doesn’t say anything. Instead, she sets off down the hallway of the apartment, looks behind the doors. There’s a filthy bathroom, a bedroom with a broken bed, and a broom closest with no brooms. And then there’s a children’s room at the end.

She stands in the doorway. It obviously belonged to a girl, a girl Vanessa’s age. There are no covers on the bed, yellowed books on the shelves, dirty teddies on the floor. She kneels down, picks up the closest one. It’s shaped like a dolphin, all dark grey fur and stuffing poking out of the stitches. The nose looks too big, like it had too much stuffing. She turns it over in her hands and brushes the bits of dirt off of it. She smiles down at it.

“You should keep it.”

She jumps, because she didn’t hear Luke sneak up behind her. He kneels down beside her, takes the dolphin from her hands gently. He smiles at it, turns it over in his hands. “You like it?”

She nods, holds her hand for it. He hands it back, and smiles again when she holds it close. When she goes to sleep that night, she curls up at Luke’s back as always. But the dolphin sits by her stomach, pressed into his back.

 

*

 

The apartment becomes home for them. When she turns fourteen, they’re still living there. The building itself is still pretty much abandoned, but several other groups of homeless folk from the city move into the apartments above and below their own. It’s become the unofficial home of the homeless, and Vanessa would be lying if she said she didn’t like it. She loved leaving the apartment in the morning, running into Carol from the apartment across and talking to Bertie and Carrie from the top floor. She loves it.

But the war outside the complex has only gotten worse.

The Covenants have pulled away from Chorus, and now the enemy is the UNSC and the Federal Army. They bully the people; viciously attack those who dare to even lift a finger against them. She remembers when Felix left to go get food one night, came back with his left earlobe ripped and the plastic black stretcher that used to be there missing. They said he’d ‘cheeked them’; though he insisted he did nothing of the sort.

There’s a new group of Chorans trying to make the world a better place. They call themselves the New Republic. She sees their posters, reads their leaflets. Luke hates them, sees them as ‘idiots trying to kick start another war’. She doesn’t see them that way. She sees them as the liberators that Chorus needs, and the Federal Army as the oppressors who need to be taken down.

She passes a group of Feds that day on her way to the river, the plastic water container in her hands. She’s alone, because most others in the complex go later in the day. She prefers to go at sunrise, before the people of the city flock to the river. When that happens, it ends up being a matter of hours before she can fill the container and take it back to the boys, and she hates waiting in the sun.

The river’s just in sigh as she passes them. She refuses to look down like so many others do. She keeps her head high, nose in the air, because she’s not a street urchin they can pick on. She can feel their eyes on her, and her mind flashes to the story one of the girls in the complex – Hilda, she remembers – once told her, how she’d been cornered by one of Feds, held at knife-point and unable to do anything as he satisfied himself.

One of the walks over, stands in her path. She glares at him and tries to push past, but the rest of them form a circle around her. They start to close in, and her heart beat speeds up. She looks to the container in her hand, turns and throws it as hard as she can. It hits the Fed hard in the face – he’s not wearing his helmet – and he falls back. She runs, runs as fast as she can.

But one of them is faster. He grabs her wrist, pulls her back. She tries to fight, and gets a smack to the face for her troubles. She falls down, and he’s on top of her, straddling her waist. He grabs her struggling wrists. He’s smiling. She spits in his face. Another smack –

And then his weight is gone. The sound of a fight. She sits up, mouth dropping open when she sees Felix, landing punch after punch on the Fed’s face. But then he’s being pulled off by the other Feds. He’s being kicked in the stomach, taking fists to the face. She struggles to her feet, tries to run and help Felix. But she’s knocked down again, takes her own beating.

But there are new people in the street, new people in tan armour. She thinks, remembers how the New Republic soldiers wore tan coloured armour. There’s gunfire. Felix is lying on the ground, too far away. She crawls to him, shields him with her own body as a firefight goes on above them. A bullet hits the floor, too close to her head. Her heart speeds up –

Silence. Total silence. All she can hear is the quick breathing of Felix below her, the quiet mumbles of someone else in the street. She dares a glance upwards, sees the group of New Republic soldiers stood amongst the bodies of the Feds. One of them walks over and offers a hand to her. She takes it, pulls herself to her feet before helping Felix up. His eye is swelled shut, his lip is bleeding and his breathing is too shallow. She turns to ask the New Republic soldiers for help, but they’re already walking away down the street.

She can hear sirens. She gets Felix back home.

 

*

 

It’s a few days later when she’s walking down the street again, proudly showing the bruises to her cheeks and eye. Luke had a fit when he saw her and Felix, insisted on stitching the cut above her eyebrow. It draws a few looks from passers-by, looks of pity. The pity annoys her more than the bruises.

There’s a member of the New Republic standing in the street. He’s holding a wad of applications, a poster behind him asking for soldiers for their cause. She doesn’t think twice before she takes an application. He passes her a pen, waits for her to fill it out there and then in the street.

She fakes her age. The application says sixteen. She takes two years from her birthdate. It also asks for a last name, but she doesn’t remember it. She’s been Vanessa for seven years, and she was nothing for two years prior to that. She remembers the day they learnt what names meant, thinks to her favourite author. Cory Kimball, author of the _History of Chorus._ Kimball means ‘war chief’. It’s a stronger name than Vanessa.

So she becomes Vanessa Kimball.

 

*

 

The boys don’t like it.

Luke has that silent fury to him. He just sits and radiates anger, refuses to look or talk to her. Felix rants, he raves, he curses the high heavens. And then he just accepts it, because she refuses to be called Vanessa anymore.

“It’s Kimball now,” she says, glaring at him from across the living room.

“Okay then, _Kimball_ ,” he viciously spits. “What made you think joining a rebellion was a good idea?”

“What happened the other day, in the street. I’m standing up against that.”

It’s not good enough. Felix curses, whirls out the door and slams it behind him.

She turns to Luke now. She wants him to say something to her. She wants him to hit her, wants him to shout and curse at her, wants him to do _something._ But he just sits there, refuses to look at her. She feels like she’s betrayed him, like she’s done something she shouldn’t have done.

She goes to the bathroom, glares at her reflection. Her thin face, too long neck, too thick lips. Brown skin so dark it’s almost black. Thin eyes, golden irises, a tiny scar below the eyelid. Her hair falls thick and curly around her shoulders, and she glares at it. She grabs the shaver without a second thought, keeps going until only stubble remains.

Felix doesn’t say anything when he gets back. He just sighs.

 

*

 

There’s a sense of melancholia when she leaves, like she knows she’s probably never going to see the boys again. Felix is there when the New Republic soldiers show up and pick her up. He pulls her into a hug, keeps hold of her a bit too long, whispers to her to be safe. Luke doesn’t say anything. He’s still staring at the wall, still refusing to speak to her.

She was going to take the dolphin teddy with her when she goes, but she instead puts it down on the table in front of Luke. She sees it as her letting go, leaving them behind. Luke still doesn’t look at her. He just looks down at the dolphin, at the overly stuffed nose and the frayed stitches.

She turns her back on the apartment, never looks back.

 

*

 

 She’s been with the New Republic four years when the mercenaries come after her.

‘Shadows’, they call themselves. A band of mercenaries who have no real affiliation in the war and will fight for the side with the most money. They become quite feared amongst the New Republic, mostly because the Feds can afford to hire them and send them after important New Republic figures. They don’t scare Kimball. Someone says she’s a fool, because she doesn’t get scared. She says that any person who’s afraid of a shadow is a coward.

She’s doing well for herself in the New Republic. She proves herself. Time and time again, she shows she can fight. She pulls herself back to base using her elbows when her legs are broken in an explosion. She catches a grenade and throws it back before it explodes, saves herself and her comrades. The glass visor of her helmet implodes during one mission. The shards embed themselves in her forehead. Her comrades leave her in the mud, thinking she’s dead. She crawls back to base, earns the respect of everyone there.

 Her squad ends up on protection duty one day, escorting the Leader out of the base and into the city. They’re getting bold, trying to make speeches and hold rallies, despite the Feds beating them down. She’s stood on the stage as the Leader makes his speech. She sees the sniper at the last second, throws herself in front of the Leader as the gunshot rings through the air.

The bullet goes straight through her left shoulder, right through the tiny gap between her chest plate and shoulder pads. She doesn’t scream when it tears its way through muscle and bone. She doesn’t scream as it pulls her back, pulls her down onto the ground. She doesn’t scream as people converge on her, as the blood begins to pool, as the pain fogs her mind.

She passes out.

They promote her when she gets out of medical weeks later. Apparently, the Leader wants her in his personal bodyguard. He liked the way she just threw herself in front of him, apparently. Liked how she didn’t think twice before putting her life on the line. He says that it was an admirable thing. So she becomes his personal bodyguard.

She’s got a hard job. It’s difficult, keeping the Leader alive. What’s worse is that the Shadows have been hired by the Feds. Obviously, the Feds aren’t good enough to kill the Leader themselves so they send the Shadow after him. She takes another few bullets for her troubles, becomes a legend amongst the younger people of the army. The Leader even has her put on posters, to show off the loyalty and the resilience of the New Republic.

Kimball becomes legend.

And it’s a heart attack that kills the Leader in the end. There’s no foul play involved, the doctors conclude. Just a history of heart disease in the guy’s family. And she supposes that maybe it was the best way for him to die. She knows she’d rather have a heart attack than a bullet to the head.

There’s a panic in the New Republic. There’s chaos in the camp. There’s no leader now, and there’ll be no organization without a leader. No one wants the Republic to fall. So they start talks on a new leader and, somehow, her name gets dragged into the conversation.

She’s not sure why, but people want her for a leader. They tell her it’s because she’s strong, she’s powerful, she refuses to back down. The young soldiers look up to her, see her as a leader, so she becomes one.

She leads the New Republic.

 

*

 

A Shadow wanders into her camp. She’s been running this resistance for seven years – seven damn long years – and the shadow just walks right in. She thought her security would’ve been better than that, but she reminds herself that shadows aren’t bound by chain-link fences or guard patrols or bullets. Shadows go wherever they want, whenever they want.

So she finds herself staring down the Shadow in the doorway of her tent. The pistol is out of reach, and it’s almost laughable really. She’s the leader of the resistance, and she’s allowed herself to get caught in her own tent, out of armour and unarmed. She supposes there are worse ways to die, but it’s a small comfort.

The Shadow regards her. Like all other Shadows, he wear steel power armour, the highlights on his being bright orange. She remembers the profiles on the Shadows, knows he’s the one they call ‘Scout’, due to his helmet. She knows he’s got thee kills to his name, about to make it four.

But the Shadow doesn’t make a move. Instead, he sighs.

“Took a long time to find you,” he says, and she’s sure she recognizes the voice. A flicker of a memory at the back of her mind, a freckled boy in an alley. “But I finally did.”

She frowns at him, and he reaches upwards, unclasps his helmet and pulls it off. Her mouth drops open, because she’s looking at Felix and she’s not seen Felix for close to twelve years. He looks different, with new scars and piercings and even a tattoo crawling up his neck from beneath the black Kevlar suit.

She doesn’t stop herself from flying at him, from pulling him into a hug.

“Missed you too,” Felix mumbles, hands gripping the back of her shirt.

 

*

 

He wants to fight for her, he tells her. But it comes at a cost. She asks about his company – about the Shadows – but he avoids the topic for a while, until she manages to coax the tale out of him one night.

“Me and Luke joined the Feds,” he says as they share rations. “We wanted to fight too. But then we ended up with the Shadows, and we could go by our own rules. Luke… he saw some shit. It changed him. You leaving changed him first, but the rest of it just piled on. He snapped one day, beat a private to a bloody pulp for calling him by name. He goes by ‘Locus’ now.”

She knows Locus. She’s seen the profile, read the words declaring him mentally unstable and extremely dangerous. She tries to connect Locus with Luke, the boy she used to sleep beside, who used to give her his rations. Luke with his too big front teeth and his dimples when he smiled. It just doesn’t add up in her mind.

“He changed,” Felix says, staring at his rations.

“We all did,” Kimball sighs.

He tells her he found out that she was the leader of the resistance, decided he’d had enough of the Feds before he left to come and offer his services to the Republic. He says he joined the Shadows to be a merc, but ended up being a Federal Army errand boy.

“I drew the line when you became our target,” he says. “I couldn’t do it. Locus… he seemed determined to do it, like it goes beyond the job.”

She doesn’t say anything. She just nods.

 

*

 

Felix runs into Locus on a hit-and-run on some rebel base. She’s on the comms with him, hears him curse and tell her that Locus is there. Her heart is in her throat. She hears the fight of the comms. Well, she hears the start of it. The comm cuts off at the fourth punch.

It takes two soldiers to bring Felix back into the camp. He’s propped up between them, arms around their shoulders. One of them is carrying his helmet, and she sees that the visor is smashed. Felix’s nose is bent horribly, and there’s blood running down his chest onto his chest plate. Both eyes are swelled shut, and his entire left cheek is just purple.

She’s sitting outside medical when the CMO walks up to her, gives her a long list of injuries that Locus gave Felix. She starts feeling sick after ‘broken jaw’. She goes into medical, draws up a chair and sits by his bedside, brushes his hair out of his eyes.

‘Felix’ means lucky. She can’t help but think that’s just a cruel joke.

 

*

 

He tries to take a shot at her.

Their base is compromised. It’s overrun by Feds. And she’s just escaping when she hears six gunshots in quick procession, followed by the six soldiers around her falling one-by-one until she’s stood amidst the bodies, blood already pooling around her booted feet. She looks up, narrows her eyes at the steel and green figure walking straight for her. She knows its Luke, knows it from the way he holds himself, the subtle limp from a broken leg healed wrong.

She takes her helmet off. She doesn’t know why; she just does it. She lets Locus see her face, makes him look at her when he kills her. And it stalls him; it makes him fucking stop dead and just stare at her. She can’t see his expression, but she hopes he’s dumbfounded beneath that helmet. She hopes there’s _fear_ on that face.

He raises his arm, aims his pistol right for her head. She stands tall, keeps her gaze level with him. And they stand like that. Several moments pass, and she’s sure the arm trembles.

The gun points downwards, the bullet rips through her abdomen.

He lets her live.

 

*

 

Felix is there when she wakes up in the med bay of their new base. He’s sat there, out of armour and looking no worse for wear. He tells her the bullet missed everything important, barely nicked arteries.

“He did that on purpose,” he says, and she sees his eyes are rimmed red, hears the croak in his face that says he’s been crying. “He let you go.”

There’s a moment of silence, and then he says, “He still has that fucking dolphin, y’know? He never got rid of it.”

She doesn’t know why, but she cries.

**Author's Note:**

> so i chose the title because vanessa means butterfly and caterpillars turn into butterflies and it's called metamorphosis and blah blah blah
> 
> anyway, hope you guys liked this
> 
> i didn't


End file.
